ProQuest Appoints John Law to Lead Enterprise Product Strategy
Summon innovator will head collaborative efforts among ProQuest assets

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Nov. 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- ProQuest has named John Law to the newly created position of Vice President, Enterprise Product Strategy. In this role, Mr. Law will lead initiatives that enable coordination among ProQuest's business areas, leveraging the company's breadth of expertise and assets to create product and service innovations.

"John's passion for our business and its potential to empower researchers and librarians has been evident in every position he's held at ProQuest," said Kurt Sanford, ProQuest CEO. "I'm confident his creativity and strategic insight will energize our efforts to collaborate across the enterprise and drive powerful new solutions for our customers."

Credited with the invention of the Summon service, Mr. Law has spent the past five years guiding it from initial development through its most recent advances as Vice-President of Discovery Services at Serials Solutions. The Summon service's genesis is in Mr. Law's landmark "Student Research Behaviors Study," which examined the discovery process and identified common barriers in access to library resources. The study provided critical information on the competitive advantages libraries hold, insights into how students choose databases, the most powerful influencers on those decisions and the environment in which students conduct research.

Prior to leading Discovery Services, Mr. Law managed the ProQuest platform, with responsibility for strategic planning, user research and definition of new features. He played a key role in the creation and implementation of ProQuest® Smart Search, an advanced technology that has sustained a differentiated benefit, along with a variety of innovations supporting search and discovery.

Mr. Law is a popular speaker on topics related to technology, user-centered design of applications, and product development, both from a library market perspective and in relation to new product management practices. He holds a bachelor's degree in Engineering from Michigan State University and a master's degree in Technology Management from Columbia University.

Mr. Law is based in ProQuest's Ann Arbor headquarters.

75th Anniversary of Landmark InnovationProQuest is celebrating the 75th anniversary of microfilm and the legacy of innovations that have supported researchers and librarians for more than a century. The launch of University Microfilms, Inc. (UMI) introduced a new era for libraries, enabling preservation and sharing of large document collections.

To commemorate this pivotal milestone, the company created a comic book that tells the story in true superhero fashion of how microfilm became the gold standard for information preservation. Eugene B. Power and the Wild Beginnings of UMI is available in print and e-book format.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company's products are a gateway to the world's knowledge including dissertations, governmental and cultural archives, news, historical collections and ebooks. ProQuest technologies serve users across the critical points in research, helping them discover, access, share, create and manage information.

The company's cloud-based technologies offer flexible solutions for librarians, students and researchers through the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, EBL® and Serials Solutions® businesses – and notable research tools such as the Summon® discovery service, the RefWorks® Flow™ collaboration platform, the Pivot™ research development tool and the Intota™ library services platform. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.